


Starstruck

by cognomen



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Captivity, Consent Issues, Interrogation, M/M, Spoilers, handjobs, past relationship, present force mindfucking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 10:28:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5493896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Kylo Ren reaches into his mind like a musician might reach between the thrumming strings of an instrument to stroke along the bared and yet untouched neck of it, beyond the active surface to the unyielding wood. Music is formed by attention to the surface of things and not what holds them up from beneath - aloft and careful.</i>
</p><p> <i>Poe realizes now - only now with a touch shuffling these things aside, that this is where the noise of the mind comes from.</i></p><p>A short study to begin to learn the characters. In which Poe is fairly confident Kylo Ren won't kill him. I'm fairly sure that anyone hunting around in the Star Wars fanfic section will have seen the film by now but spoilers live here!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Starstruck

Kylo Ren reaches into his mind like a musician might reach between the thrumming strings of an instrument to stroke along the bared and yet untouched neck of it, beyond the active surface to the unyielding wood. Music is formed by attention to the surface of things and not what holds them up from beneath - aloft and careful.

Poe realizes now - only now with a touch shuffling these things aside, that this is where the noise of the mind comes from.

Thoughts ring over the top like sound waves slip over the surface of water. Ren reaches past this to the impassible core, pressing some insistent touch to the solid center of Poe's mind. Far past thought, though the touch tickles along the threads of them with a buzzing and tricky sensation, perhaps tasting the flavor of them without needing to go any further along these vias yet. At the best, Ren knows him too well, and at the worst this is not the first time he's pressed so intimately against the furthest recesses and hard planes of Poe's mind.

Previously, he had _asked_.

But it is past ten years since then, growing closer each day to twenty, and this time Ren reaches in not to share or understand, but to take.

Poe never was any good at holding out against him (or for him, when he asked or demanded) - not in those long, lazy summer days at the lake or with their fingers dipped into some machine or another for repairs or beneath the sprawling limbs of the fast-growing tree that Luke Skywalker had given his parents. Before Skywalker had become a myth.

He thinks of it now under this assault; gold limbs, gold leaves in green stained light. It flowered gold, too, at no predictable interval, giving off a heady, resinous scent. For a moment, this memory helps. It surprises Ren (one weakness of linking their minds together are the echoes that pass outward). He has versions of these memories locked away, hidden like his face behind the mask. It's all Poe can do to pull on these old memories. He certainly can't repel the intimate touch, can't ignore the suggestion of thrust out fingers. In his mind they are pulling on the thread of the map, of the data crystal.

Poe turns his thoughts away. It's a wresting sensation like tearing his legs off at the knees, but for a moment, for two seconds he can hold onto the memory of how that hand felt between his own, with fingers intertwined and holding tight. It's a mistake for a metaphor - too close to the image of holding onto his own thoughts.

Ren pushes deeper, pries the fingers apart and pushes past the impermeable place in his mind, finding some channel in and pushing it open wide, pressing deeper until this sudden, overwhelming sensation is all there is. It's beyond anything, beyond the sum of everything Poe's ever felt, from the first screaming infant pangs of hunger to the first shocking, teeth-vibrating orgasmic release of young adulthood. 

The answer tips into Ren's waiting grip, as eager as Poe ever was in his hands, as helpless. He's only aware that he'd been screaming by the deep, raw feeling in his throat; the dryness in his mouth. The instinct to swallow and swallow, like a man trying to drink a lake not to drown. He hears Ren's voice as if from a distance. There's more of Ben in it, for a moment, or maybe that's just a foggy echo called up by the proximity of their minds in tandem.

_Do you feel what I feel?_

The door closes. Ren does not bother to leave a guard. Poe does not resist the restraints; all of his muscles feel like cut and tender cords. The darkness of the room is a blessing of nothingness that Poe accepts, at least for a little while.

-

Time passes. When Kylo Ren returns to him, he does not turn on the light. His voice has lost the hard, mechanical edge. It summons strength back into Poe's limbs as he winds himself up for resistance.

"I had forgotten all those things," Ren's voice - _Ben's_ voice.

"It happened in the light," Poe says. "Nice to know it meant so little."

His heart fractures - like those little cracks in his collar bones from flying too hard and tossing himself against the harness. Just that sore and no more. If it doesn't break the frame of the X-wing, he can still fly.

"Those things happened to a different person," Ren says. "Why would they mean anything to me?"

"You're asking _me_ for a reason? Ben-"

"Don't call me that."

"Alright," Poe says. "Your family and mine used to drift together. Not every year. Just enough so that we grew up together. That's why it should matter."

"Was the experience so different for you?" It's an amnesiac's question, a dreaming tone that's out of line with the rest of him now, but not so far from the young man Poe remembers.

"No," Poe says. At least, he thinks not. "Take the lenses off. You've already shed the helmet. Half the time you were in my head anyway. You know what it was like."

Silence answers Poe for so long that he wonders if he's missed an answer. He feels connected to his body again - the prior rough handling had left him drifting, as if partially torn free - but it's no mercy. Poe's sharply sore in the small of his back, his shoulders, his neck. His head throbs slowly, out of time with his heartbeat.

His mouth is still dry. He knows better than to break the spell by asking for anything. He doesn't want to show the weakness even if Ren surely knows better. Poe is pretty sure - given that he's still alive after Ren has what he wants - that Ren won't kill him now. He's not sure Ren won't give orders for it. It's a fine line, which suits Poe just fine. He can navigate anything, and it's better when it's a challenge.

"Those memories are very far away," Ren says. "You pay a price to learn what I've learned."

" _You_ pay a price," Poe says. He tests his bonds - tight. "Have you learned anything worth it?"

"The power-"

"Yeah, yeah, power. The force. Light side, Dark side. I'm asking if you _learned_ anything."

Kylo Ren doesn't answer him. Poe doesn't expect one; he's not the only voice from the past to reach out and try to call Ben back. A veritable chorus must live in the echoing spaces of his memories, rattling around in that mask of his. 

"Right now, you know," Poe tries anyway. "You could still put it all down and pick up the thread of your old life. You can still displace the burden."

Ren's silence continues. Poe wants to ask why, now that Ren knows what he's looking for, Poe's still alive, but half his luck lies in knowing when not to push it. This time, when Ren reaches out under the threads of Poe's consciousness it's almost gentle - _almost_ a request, except for the confidence in it. He knows he will be admitted. 

Poe flinches away - if there had been a gesture to warn him, he'd lost it in the darkness. But he doesn't resist, not exactly. Instead he drops down into memory, letting Ren reach down into the echoes of other such contacts between them. If Ren's given up his memories for such power as he seems to think, Poe can remember for him. Ren can decide then if what he's gotten is worth the total cost.

He remembers a hazy summer afternoon first, behind the house, beneath the tree. Hot, sticky afternoon air and sun filter down through the lifted canopy onto skin that was bare to it, two shades of flesh enshadowed together. they are both breathing hard, panting their way up the rapid ascent of teenage pleasure, skin pressed close. Ben's hand is closed over Poe's guiding his strokes and setting the pace in greedy, quick time on his own cock, rushing him.

Poe, starstruck - a little, he was young and Ben was a _Solo_ , a force user, a bright star on his own - watches the color come up in Ben's cheeks, the soft and helpless shape his mouth makes as it expels pleasured breaths and sighs past his teeth. (Outside the scope of the memory, Poe knows that he was dangerous with them even then; Ben never quite understood the line between enough pressure and too much. Not that Poe minded, terribly, the bruises he carried even sometimes after the Solos had departed again.)

He's gotten to know this just well enough - can sense the changes in the mind brushing intimately against his own well enough - that he can sense the moment of precipice. It's only then, usually, when Ben remembers to get his rough fingers around Poe's cock in turn - now hard as steel and aching for touch. It's not this inexpert caress that brings Poe over but the open, intense echo of Ben's release sent rattling around in his own mind. It's the most intense thing Poe's ever felt, a sort of helpless escalation past what should be possible with so little touch. It's like gravity's turned against him. Like the lurching sensation of spinning over and over at a speed faster than sound in atmosphere or that precipitous moment before a spacecraft jerks into faster than light speed. Invariably, his body catches up, yanked over into gasping, pouring orgasm that leaves him helpless and lost in it, trying to catch up with the shock of the sensation.

In the afterglow - at the time the efforts of hands and the novelty of proximity for two differently isolated young men seemed monumental - they are only very slow to draw apart.

Poe remembers exactly the roughness of Ben's thumb against the back of his hand (and the head of his cock) and the smoothness of his cheek. It felt like reaching out across galaxies and finding that you aren't alone. Poe's isolation had been the stationary sort, left to look up at the stars and learn that they _could_ be reached while stuck in gilded and green safety as the golden tree got bigger. Ben's had been the isolation of travel and impermanence, of the overshadowing of his own parents, of legacy. He'd seen the tree grow in stuttering stop motion.

-

"Did you really think all that back then?" Ren's voice - husky, deeper (out of breath?) - interrupts, pulling Poe back out of the light.

"Back then, I thought you had a big nose like your father, but that you were very handsome anyway," Poe says. No sense lying to a Sith that still has the fingers of touch in Poe's mind.

Ren doesn't answer. He doesn't leave or kill Poe either. Maybe that's not how it works, but his touch, the _presence_ of him is thrust so far into Poe he's sure that Ren could twist his grip and either tear something free or send him over the edge into ecstasy with a nudge.

"I envied you for having a choice of legacy," Poe admits. "But I guess I had it easy. I had one option - to be a good pilot."

"No one is limited to the footsteps of their parents."

"You chose Skywalker."

"No," this is forceful, angry, old. In Poe's mind this is a darker memory of rush and mouths, of shoving each other until one of them gave way and submitted. With the clarity of hindsight, Poe remembers it was him. _He_ always gave way to these fits of temper. The touch recedes to avoid getting pulled down into another memory.

"Vader. I chose Vader at the height of his power."

Poe laughs. It hurts all the way down to his ribs. "It's not so long in the past that you can pick one aspect of what Darth Vader was and ignore all the others. I heard the same stories you did."

Silence answers him. Poe isn't sure if Ren is still there. What's left of the presence in his mind may only be an afterimage, like fingers pressed to skin for a long time.

"Even Snoke can't change the past," Poe says, quietly. 

Darth Vader's moment of greatest strength had been to act with the light. Poe gets no answer. It's then, alone in the dark with his memories of kisses and fingers or teeth on skin he feels any fear at all. 

He is confident that whatever Ben has become, he will not actively kill Poe - but how easy would it be to forget him here in the dark of the ship until he is digested by indifference and then, consumed, expel him into space?

It would be no harder, Poe expects, than forgetting all their summer days together and the feel of intertwined fingers.  
-

**Author's Note:**

> -Beta read by the amazing, the incomparable Q (http://archiveofourown.org/users/Quedarius/pseuds/Quedarius) who also is a shameless encourager of bad ideas.


End file.
